We Need More Characters Like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narrator
It’s hard to be something you can’t see.
I experience other people as onslaught. Even the ones I love need limits. I am old enough now, with enough solitude behind me, that I can no longer say exactly why this is so. Perhaps I sought the state of aloneness because I was constitutionally suited to it, or perhaps I became suited to it because, born bookish and shy, I experienced it so frequently, at such long intervals.
Whatever the answer, my desire to be secluded, sequestered from the needs and moods of others, is no longer something I try to change about myself. I have, in the past few years, begun to treat it as feature rather than bug. It’s an aspect of the landscape I navigate around, not one I consider razing.
Logistically, this looks like leaving my phone unanswered, my inbox unread. It looks like avoiding stop-and-chats with all the people one encounters on an average day—the property manager, the barista, the friendly co-ed who works at the local boutique. It looks like not answering my door when the bell rings, waiting and hoping for the person on the other side to retreat back into the world.
My love of solitude springs, at least in part, from a tendency to overidentify with others: I am a good listener, and a natural empath—I am the kind of person who is routinely waylaid by people with the desperate need to relay a long life story, even when I am actively engaging diversionary tactics. It’s because of this tendency that I gravitate away from sociability: so often involuntarily subject to the push and pull of other people’s needs, I choose separation when the option is presented to me. I actively avoid embeddedness in the pulse of a community, in a neighborhood, in a web of interaction.
Such resistance—an inward orientation—seems, on the one hand, as if it might lend itself to family-making, which strikes me as a fundamentally unworldly enterprise. Like a marriage, a family is a secret universe, a nonporous place, inaccessible even as—perhaps because—it is reified by the outside world. On the other hand, however, I am pretty sure that mothers are expected to answer the phone when it rings, to open the door at the bell, to teach their children how best to navigate the world. Would childbearing destroy my solitude? Or, on the other side of the issue, would my yen for solitude destroy my children?
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If there’s a more realistic, compelling depiction of childless “monsterhood” in contemporary fiction than the narrator of Jhumpa Lahiri’s recent novel Whereabouts, I’ve yet to read it. In a series of gossamer vignettes, the novel relates a year in the life of an unnamed female narrator, a woman unmarried and without children, who teaches at a university in an unidentified city (perhaps an Italian one, as the novel was written and originally published in Italian) and spends most of her time alone. In an early chapter entitled “In My Head,” the narrator writes of her solitary nature:
“Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect.”
Though her solitude is the defining aspect of her life, she reports being happy on her own, saying:
“I’m grateful to be on my own, to be in charge of my space and my time—this in spite of the silence, in spite of the lights I never switch off when I leave the house, along with the radio I always keep playing.”
And indeed, she does seem happy—or at least undeluded. Several chapters later, this happiness is seen in relief, juxtaposed with the more common narrative thrust for women of a certain age. The narrator’s friend comes over for a visit, and this friend is in many ways her opposite:
“She’s in her forties like me but she’s rushing through life, she’s always harried. She has everything I don’t: a husband, kids, constant plans, a country house. In other words, the successful life my parents had hoped I’d lead one day.”
Predictably, the grass is not entirely greener:
“She tells me my spartan place is a refuge for her. I make her a cup of tea. ‘This is the only place where I can relax,’ she says. She likes the silence, and not seeing objects scattered everywhere. . . . She says: ‘In my house I can never just sit and be. There’s always something that needs to be done.”
Because of the discrepancy in their life choices, the women’s friendship is not entirely one of equals. The narrator, the woman in the duet with space and time to spare—the one whose solitude draws quiet moments toward her like flecks of metal toward a magnet—serves, by her own admission, as “therapist” to her bustling, busier friend. When at the end of the vignette the friend describes her impatience with her career, the way she inevitably tires of every new business trip, the narrator reflects,
“Isn’t that the case with your husband and kids, with your house? Isn’t that why you’re always traveling, why you leave them behind every other week?”
She doesn’t, of course, actually say anything. Her insight is evaluation unaccompanied by judgment. She can see the sites of the other woman’s trouble as clearly as she sees her own, despite the gulf in their situations. Which begs the questions: is she able to see so clearly because of all the space in her life? Do the ineluctable conditions of aloneness keep her from developing the kind of myopia her more conventional friend seems to suffer from? Does, as Meghan Daum suggested in The Unspeakable, the hustle and bustle of childbearing keep her friend from feeling the onslaught of time, and excuse her from investigating the problem of herself?
It is rather unusual to see single, solitary women depicted accurately in fiction. It’s as if, unobserved in life, they have also fled the stage of literature, their independence insulating them from narrative force.
Because that is one thing the narrator has, even if she lacks husband, family, and country home: she possesses an examined life. Lahiri’s narrator is keenly aware of herself and her state; she knows what kind of life she is living, and accepts it as the result of conscious choice. Lahiri’s novel effectively captures the narrator’s inner world; it externalizes the narrator’s internal state, generating and displaying action not through relationship or event as much as through thought and reflection. The narrator is, above all else, a single, monstrous woman rendered incredibly realistically on the page. As a woman who has lived alone for most of her life, I found her quite relatable, if also incredibly rare.
In the rarity of Lahiri’s character is an unexpected irony: despite the prevailing cultural image of the lone writer or artist, whose work owes its genius to detachment from domestic mundanity, it is rather unusual to see single, solitary women depicted accurately in fiction. It’s as if, unobserved in life, they have also fled the stage of literature, their independence insulating them from narrative force.
If, then, our ideas about what to do next are always drawn from existing scripts, it’s no wonder a childless life feels plotless to me. It’s unimaginable because so little imagined, at least not in public. Lahiri’s novel, then, is a sort of counterweight to the “literature of domestic ambivalence,” which so often depicts motherhood and partnership, even if only as framing: it shows a single, childless woman’s existence in live action.
Yes, that existence looks lonely. But it also looks—accurately, as I can attest—expansive, open, and attentive. As worthy a way of being as any other we know.